Thought Leadership

Effects of Social Platforms

In this five part video series, our Managing Director of UK and Nordics Steve Wing, recaps the trends and key takeaways for programmatic advertising that were presented at Ad Week Europe in London.

Part 3 focuses on the effects of social platforms, and how big tech is driving growth.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Steve Wing AdWeek Europe AW360 Live Interview

Jack Hershman: How much harder is your job made by social platforms – or is it made easier?

Steve Wing: I think, in many respects, you can look at it both ways. It’s always hard, because they soak up share of time and share of revenue, they’re a competitor. On the other hand, for lots of people, they’re a shorthand for programmatic buying, or data led buying, or using a UI to buy, and they help grow digital investment overall. So, if they are helping brands and agencies and publishers understand some of the direction of travel around formats in advertising, then that’s a good thing. But, obviously, we have to compete with them like everybody else does, for just share of revenue and share of consumer time.

Jack Hershman: It’s difficult, isn’t it, because you look at just the sheer amount of the market that they hold. I mean, do you see a point where it starts to come back in the other direction?

Steve Wing: There are lots of different flavors of social, and if you look at the big publishers and the small publishers. They’re actually, from a user perspective, they’re growing bigger audiences than they’ve ever grown before, and they’re creating brilliant products for those people. And really getting under the skin of them. So I think that the social platform, or people’s desire to connect and share, certainly around kind of passionate points, is never going to go away. I think great journalism, conversely, has got a very, very bright future.

Jack Hershman: Yeah, I think my trust piece is the most important thing. Not to bash big tech, but it’s unavoidable to talk about. It’s been such a big talking point in the news, about the various big data breaches and things. That has to be beneficial for you, in some ways, right?

Steve Wing: Well, you know, I don’t think you ever want to benefit from overall pain, so it is part of a discussion. But there’s a lot of noise. We talked a bit about it on the panel, you know, collaboration, removing complexity, stakeholders, the three main stakeholders – the consumer, the brand, and the publishers – all having a good discussion together to help solve some of the problems. I think that’s probably going to, those kinds of issues will hopefully force us to think more imaginatively about how we get together to be more successful. So, I think it’s unhelpful for the market overall when things go wrong.